The days of the150-lb, 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary are numbered. This week, Oxford University Press announced it’s just too expensive to print.

The next complete edition of the dictionary, dubbed OED3, will only be available online. The dictionary was first published in 1928, after 71 years of exhaustive research on all the conceivable words in the English language, including Scrabble-lovers “zyxt.” An online edition of the OED has been around since the 1980s.

it claims to carry 90% of “core textbooks”. So instead of sinking hundreds of dollars on textbooks that you have to lug around, you just zap them into an iPad. Zap. Even if it’s closer to 50% of those textbooks, that’s still pretty amazing.

Of course, you still have to sink hundred of dollars into an iPad. I wonder if college kids would be better off ditching the computer and just bringing iPads to school.

Dime stores disappeared a long time ago. Now it seems dime store novels may be going extinct as well. Talking about mass market paperback books, the kind you see at a drug store or Wal-Mart. Cheaply made, cheaply sold romance novels, sci-fi, westerns, true crime. Stuff that isn’t going to win the Pulitzer but will do just fine for a day at the beach.

Readers have been turning to larger trade paperbacks, hardcovers, or electronic books. This week mass market publisher Dorchester Publishing said they’re walking away from paper altogether and concentrating on e-books and print on demand.

Dorchester’s decision comes at a time when romance novels in electronic form are very popular but the way they’re printed is not.